Chris wrote:
>Government schooling is one of the main reasons why so many of the people
>on this list do not understand evolution. Evolution must be short shrifted
>(and, if you've ever had your shorts shrifted, you know just how painful
>that can be! :-) ), because it is too powerful an idea to allow very many
>people to understand it. Even Susan, one of the smartest and sweetest
>damsels on this list, does not understand it, really, because, if she did,
>she'd see why generalized government schooling is a bad idea, why it leads
>not to *more* education, but *less*, why it *favors* the anti-evolutionist
>views in the long run, why it thwarts education, why it is, even for what
>good it provides in the lower grades, *vastly* more expensive than it needs
>to be, and so on. Because she does not deeply understand evolution, she
>*can't* fully understand economics, politics, history, and so on. Thus,
>despite her basic rationality, she herself holds many beliefs that
>implicitly contradict evolutionary theory in favor of very conventionalistic
>moral and political theories.
>Of course, evolution in our society goes on, even if government tries to
>stop it (as it does, because government finds real change that it can't
>control and predict to be disturbing), but it goes on much more slowly than
>it otherwise would, and at hugely greater cost to our lives.
>Eventually, the quaint but very destructive idea that government can educate
>well will be dumped by human society, but, in the mean time, we all must
>pay, directly and indirectly, for this stifling of the human spirit.
>The lame editorial that Susan so skewers so well in the same post in which
>she made the remarks above shows what happens in a society in which
>education is left mostly to the government. It is written by an uneducated
>person and directed at an uneducated audience, an audience that was produced
>largely by the government schools. In a free society, there would be very
>little audience for such drivel; in ours, it's large enough to enable it to
>get published by Universal Press Syndicate.